I’m probably not alone in having a completely mistaken impression of the circumstances under which Jimi Hendrix played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. In my mind, Hendrix kicked off the festival with the National Anthem, the first time anyone had ever played it on electric guitar. He followed it with a tight set full of hits, after which Richie Havens was catapulted onstage amidst fireworks, already furiously strumming his dreadnought.

In fact, Hendrix closed out the festival, which by Sunday was already running fully nine hours behind schedule. Organizers invited him to play at midnight, but that would have meant someone would play after him, and Hendrix’s manager insisted his act be the absolute last person onstage. That meant Jimi’s set started at the very rock and roll hour of 8:30 a.m. - on a Monday! He played for a fraction of the crowd he would have had at midnight, but it was a fortuitous choice for prosperity: it meant Hendrix could be photographed in daylight for the documentary film that would become the definitive pop-culture record of the event.

Jimi’s set was not, to say the least, tight. In fact, Hendrix’s two-hour set turned out to be the longest show of his career, Charles R. Cross noted in his 2005 biography Room Full of Mirrors. “The Star-Spangled Banner” came near the end, and it immediately captivated the audience - though any Hendrix fans should have seen it coming, as the anthem had been part of Jimi’s set list for years. The guitarist, an Army veteran himself and the son of another, wasn’t an uncritical patriot but certainly intended more reverence than many of his listeners heard. Nonetheless, it immediately became a signature performance of not just his career but the entire decade: New York Post critic Al Aronowitz called it “probably the single greatest moment of the ‘60s.”

I’m always willing to give books about fictional musicians a try, but I’m typically disappointed: I love reading fiction, but there are simply too many extraordinary true stories in music history for a novelist to compete. Jimi Hendrix is a perfect case in point: his all-too-brief life was an incredible journey though a transformative decade, completely unlikely and yet also completely representative.

Hendrix grew up in Seattle, with a handful of detours as his very young parents’ tumultuous relationship saw the future star and his siblings moved from one household to another. If it seems unlikely that one of the era’s biggest Black stars would come out of Seattle, consider how ill-informed Dick Clark was when he infamously expressed surprise that Prince came from Minneapolis. Like the latter city, Seattle had a rich social and musical African American community, and while Hendrix proved much more itinerant than Prince, he always remained rooted there: in one of the most poignant passages in Cross’s book, Hendrix hops in a car after a late-sixties Seattle show with his then-girlfriend Carmen Borrero and a teenage chauffeur, directing them past the houses where he’d played, the clubs where he’d played his first shows, and the high school he’d failed out of. “On every block there was someplace he had stayed,” Borrero later remembered. “He had a story about every one.”

You may remember that Hendrix had a stint playing guitar in Little Richard’s band (he proved too showy for the piano pounder, who didn’t appreciate the competition), but that was just the tip of the iceberg: while paying his dues on the Chitlin’ Circuit and elsewhere, he accumulated such a starry résumé that later publicists would hesitate to tell the truth - lest they be accused of lying. Hendrix played with everyone from Joey Dee and the Starliters to Ike and Tina Turner. Once he had the opportunity to go solo, the seasoned showman was ready.

Cross reminds readers of just how rapid Hendrix’s rise was once he hit his stride with the trio dubbed the Jimi Hendrix Experience: the star along with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. The move to England came at the behest of Animals bassist Chas Chandler, who would become the artist’s most important manager; Chandler was looking to break out of his band to become a producer, and he thought if he could find an artist to cover Tim Rose’s “Hey Joe,” it could be a U.K. hit. As it happened, Hendrix was already obsessed with the song; when Chandler heard Hendrix play it at the Cafe Wha, he got so excited he spilled his milkshake.

It turned out that Chandler’s instincts were right: England, where American rockers were revered, immediately embraced Hendrix when he landed squarely in the middle of classic swinging London circa 1966. On the very day he recorded “Purple Haze” - January 11, 1967 - Hendrix played a club gig where the audience included three Beatles, two Who, two Yardbirds, one Rolling Stone, Eric Clapton, and, of course, Donovan. Later that year, Hendrix covered “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” three days after the album came out, to an audience that again included the Beatles; it was Paul McCartney who tapped Hendrix to play the Monterey Pop Festival. By 1969, he was the highest-paid rock star in the world; Cross notes that when he played Madison Square Garden that year, Hendrix made $14,000 a minute. Adjusting for inflation, at his peak Hendrix was making more per show than Taylor Swift does today - and much more per minute.

At this point, Hendrix’s extraordinary story - a guitar god, one of rock’s true innovators - becomes sadly ordinary in the sense that he fell victim to the same grinder that has claimed so many of his peers. The “27 Club” isn’t just an eerie coincidence: that’s right about the age when an escalating cycle of stress and drug abuse taxes even a young and healthy body to its limits. With melancholy exactitude, Cross dismisses any conspiracy theories about Hendrix’s 1970 death in a London hotel room: he combined a heavy dose of barbiturates with alcohol, with predictable consequences.

Cross is more concerned with biographical details than with musical insight, so look elsewhere for the latter - but Room Full of Mirrors, named after a Hendrix song inspired by a handcrafted mirror the artist’s father Al showed the author - is very strong on the former, while remaining readable. It’s a worthy record of one of the most impactful lives in American popular music.